FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT INQUIRY - PAGE 3

LONDON (Reuters) - Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown flatly contradicted media tycoon Rupert Murdoch at a judicial hearing on Monday, suggesting the News Corp chief had misled the government-sponsored inquiry into press ethics under oath. Murdoch told the inquiry earlier this year that the then Labour prime minister telephoned him in September 2009 after The Sun newspaper switched its allegiance to the Conservative Party and threatened to unleash war on Murdoch's company in revenge.

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - French former President Nicolas Sarkozy has not been put under formal investigation by magistrates looking into whether he received illegal campaign funds from France's richest woman in 2007, but has instead been designated a witness in the inquiry. Magistrates questioned Sarkozy for 12 hours as they tried to establish if he had received illegal campaign funding from Liliane Bettencourt, heiress of the L'Oreal cosmetics empire, when he ran for president in 2007.

WELLINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key has launched a inquiry into "unlawful" spying by government agents leading to the arrest of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who is fighting extradition to the United States where he faces charges of internet piracy and breaking copyright laws. The probe may deal another blow to the U.S. case after a New Zealand court ruled in June that search warrants used in the raid on Dotcom's home earlier this year, requested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, were illegal.

LILLE, France (Reuters) - French investigators looking into Dominique Strauss-Kahn's ties to a suspected prostitution ring in the northern city of Lille want to extend the inquiry to cover alleged group rape by the former IMF chief and three friends, prosecutors said on Friday. Strauss-Kahn is under formal investigation over whether he was aware he was dealing with prostitutes and pimps when attending sex parties in Lille, Paris and Washington in 2010 and 2011 allegedly organized by business acquaintances.

LONDON (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch appeared on Thursday before an inquiry delving into the power he wields over politicians and police and how far it resulted in a culture where phones could be hacked by his journalists and rules routinely broken. Following are key quotes from Murdoch's second day of testimony: ON COVER UP CULTURE Asked where the culture of cover-up emanates from: "I think from within the News of the World and there were one or two very strong characters there who I think had been there many, many years and were friends of the journalists - the person I'm thinking of was a friend of the journalists and a drinking pal and clever lawyer and forbade them ... to report to Mrs (Rebekah)

WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (Reuters) - An independent inquiry into the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, sharply criticized the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to protect the compound, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The newspaper cited congressional and State Department officials for the report.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Former Saab Chairman Victor Muller will be called in to answer questions related to a Swedish inquiry into alleged tax offences at the bankrupt carmaker, the country's Economic Crime Authority said on Tuesday. Muller, chief executive of the Spyker sports-car group that bought Saab from General Motors in 2010, is not suspected of wrongdoing. "The Gothenburg district attorney has confirmed that Mr Muller is not a suspect and may be invited for an interview after summer, possibly in October," Spyker said in a statement.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Carla del Ponte, a former U.N. chief prosecutor, was on Friday appointed a member of a United Nations commission investigating war crimes in Syria. The commission is gathering evidence for possible future trials of individuals and military units suspected of committing abuses in the 18-month-old conflict in which forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are seeking to quell an uprising against him. Switzerland proposed that del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general, become a commissioner and lobbied hard on her behalf, overcoming resistance by some countries that found her too controversial, diplomats said.